My parents were always out of town; and we had a great house for entertaining. All we needed were the guests. So we were constantly hitting on girls who didn’t go to our school. With girls from a different high school, you could make yourself out to be whoever you wanted. Put differently: it made it much easier to lie.
Later, when Bill and I started hanging out and he was continually asking, “God, how can I get pussy? How can I meet women?” I was telling him: “Dude, you have got to come to one of these dinner parties.” His response was always the same: “No, I’m not interested in meeting these girls and getting them drunk. I’m not interested in your other friends. The whole concept of trying to get a girl drunk to have sex with her is wrong.” Bill saw it as tricking a girl into having sex.
Then, of course when I ran into Bill the next Monday at school the first word out of his mouth was always: “So?” And, provided I’d got laid, I’d tell him.
Bill’s later periods of overindulgence in alcohol (and drugs, for that matter) might make it hard to believe, but during this time Bill made fun of teenage drinking. Drinking in general. And smoking. He and Dwight had their own private code phrase -“WDPS,” short for “Why do people smoke” – to confirm to each other how superior they were in the way they lived. We were just trying to point out to him that, well, if you wanted to get some pussy, it really helped your cause to get girls drunk. It was part of the recipe, and that’s just the way it was.
Of course, with so much peer pressure, eventually he caved. Sweet Jesus, it’s a miracle. He wasn’t going to start drinking, not yet anyway, but he would come to a dinner party.
Originally, it was just, “Hey, show up.” He wouldn’t have it, saying, “No, it’s too weird. I don’t drink and I don’t want to get sucked into this big, long evening with your friends.” So, he was never a normal dinner guest, but he found a way to participate. We had to make a joke out of it. For me, it was funny. “Ha-ha” funny. For my other, “cooler” friends, it was less humorous and more: “Why is Kevin dicking around with this goofy guy?” But Bill created a character named “Happy.” Happy was somewhere between Jerry Lewis and Charlie – Flowers for Algernon Charlie. Mix that with a few hundred gallons of caffeine, and that’ll put you in Happy’s head.
Bill, or Happy, couldn’t just be there, hanging out when the guests arrived. There had to be an entrance and a show. Bill needed to perform. It was all in the timing. We would actually sit there and chart out everything. At precisely 19:30, I call Bill’s house. I let the phone ring exactly once and hang up. At precisely 19:42 Bill arrives at my house, and waits in the bushes at the north-east corner of the lot.
While Bill was bicycling across the neighborhood to my house, we were setting the table. “Yeah, we have this friend. He goes by the name ‘Happy.’ He’s kind of, oh, ‘special.’ He’s kind of ‘different.'” The girls would be asking, “What? Is he retarded? What do you mean?” “No, you’ll see.”
At some point in the charade, when the girls seemed sufficiently intrigued, I would usually go up to my bedroom and open the window to signal Bill, then I’d go back downstairs and, after just a long enough pause for it to seem that the two events might be unrelated, “Bing-bong-bing-bong-bing-bong.” The doorbell. Right on cue. “Uhp, there’s Happy.” We open the door and this super-manic teen ‘tard comes bouncing into the house. “Hi, I’m Happy. Hi. Hi. Hi.”
The character was so hopeful, but also tragic. And at its core, it was just another ploy. We were scheming to make the girls think that there was this other level of depth to us because we were caring for this person with special needs, trying to paint it so it looked like we were more interested in making sure this person had a place to spend his Saturday nights than we were in getting laid. The exact opposite was true. And, of course, this was supposed to get us laid.
Sometimes Bill, as Happy, would come and eat, but he never stayed the whole night. Right before it got to the heavy drinking portion of the evening he would usually disappear. About that time the character of Happy would start to wear thin. Bill knew it, too. “Yeah, I gotta go.” And he’d go. The girls would make their false protests. “No, Happy. Stay.” Then the next day they’d ask: “How’s Happy? Is he okay?” You’d like to think that we got our comeuppance for this. In fact, the whole thing only turned Bill on even more.
But “Happy” kind of ran its course. It was putting Bill in social situations, but its questionable aphrodisiac effects certainly weren’t getting him any closer to getting laid. It might even have been hindering the efforts of everyone else.
For us to go out and act cool -“Look how muscular we are” or “Look how cool our car is” – that was never going to work for us. I was driving a station wagon. Bill had no car. Bill was emulating Woody Allen in his comedy, why not emulate him in his social life as well? Allen was not just Bill’s role model; we all adopted him as our anti-hero. He gave us our instruction manual for how to pick up women. The goal, quite simply, was to be the biggest nerd, the biggest dweeb you could be, yet still interact with other people. The right woman, the one who also thought jocks were losers and being arty was cool: she would get it.
There was even this one girl, who hooked up with both Bill and, later, David Johndrow. She was a complete knock-off of Diane Keaton. Straight out of Annie Hall. Coincidence? Maybe. We watched a lot of Woody Allen movies. This girl actually ended up being David’s girlfriend. I remember David saying on multiple occasions, “Well, I’m just glad Bill and her never slept together.” He’d always say that. I’d go, “Uh, yeah. Right, David.” Bite my tongue. Apparently she had told David that she never slept with Bill. Bill told me different.
Guys will believe things because they want to, and being a sucker can make you cynical in a hurry. There’s a balance between being a cold and callous womanizer who uses girls like a commodity and someone who can be genuine. Despite what his stage persona intimated, and for all of our clumsy attempts at teenage mating, Bill almost always tried to tip the scales in favor of being the latter. But he was not someone who was opposed to a one-night stand either.
Watching Bill interact with women in his mid to late teens really was like watching a Woody Allen movie as he would try to impress girls who were way out of his league. I don’t think it was any consolation to Bill for him to know how well he was emulating one of his comedie idols. Except it wasn’t funny. Sure, at the time it was a little funny, in the way that any teen misfortune of a friend is funny because it happened to them and not to you. But Bill was just clumsy with girls.
I don’t think he had any, any, luck with girls until his junior year of high school. God knows we tried to get the boy laid. He tried, too. He would talk to girls, but he’d be doing these goofy routines that were long and involved and predicated on the girls playing along. The bowl haircut, pale skin and gawky figure didn’t do anything to help.
As uncomfortable as Bill was in a nightclub, he was totally comfortable in the comedy club. He belonged, despite the fact that his choice of lifestyle was 180 degrees from the rest of the comics doing sets at the Comedy Workshop. During his senior year he was doing a couple of shows a week at the club. Sometimes fewer, usually more. One or two weekends a month I was coming back to Houston from The University of Texas in Austin. It’s about three hours west of Houston down Highway 290. Piece of cake. We would get together and play as Stress. And he’d have a gig. Just about every time I came back, Bill was doing a show. And every time the crowd was just a little bit bigger.
Bill got along with the other comics. He might have been a kid by age but not by his comedy. For that they respected him. But he couldn’t hang out. He was still in high school, and even if he hadn’t been they were just at a different speed than Bill.
At 18, Bill went to LA to be a comedian. Novel? No. It’s a cliché. The busloads of teenagers who turn up in Hollywood to “make it?” Bill was now one of those. But, given where he came from, Bill was being incredibly daring and bold. The Midwesterners, those people were desperate. What were their other options? Stay in Dubuque, Iowa, and serve Blizzards